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Commentary

Google Caught Out, Again, By 'Buy Fake Passport' Sting

Oh Google, you really do yourself no favours, do you? No, I'm not talking about the Google employees who researched mobile phone addiction and found smartphones are like "pocket slot machines" relying on "trigger, action, reward," which never
truly ends as social media pages allow us to scroll infinitely.

No -- we're talking about criminal PPC here. One can almost imagine the morning newsroom meeting at The Times. Every few
months they must wonder aloud what Google is up to and how they can be caught out. Every few months an investigation by the paper unveils some other lapse in corporate governance or, at the very
least, a lack of control over what appears on its platforms.

We have had a string of findings over Google-owned YouTube embarrassing brands by allowing them to advertise alongside hate speech and
terror videos. There was a promise to do better, but then The Times found that things were not completely remedied in a follow-up.

Today we have a story that should embarrass the
tech giant even more than these previous findings, although it is unlikely to lead to a boycott, as they did. This is about Google's oversight of its platform, rather than brand image.

Read
today's article and you will be left scratching
your head. How on earth could Google be so stupid?

The sting was amazingly simple. The Times pretended to have a company selling fake IDs, passports and reviews. They did
so because of whispers that Google allows companies to advertise against these terms. The pretend company was soon allowed to register on Google and start bidding on a variety of search terms. These
included, "buy fake reviews", "buy fake IDs," "fake disability parking permits," and so on.

Apparently, clicks were costing around 57p to 69p. Attempts to buy advertising against
searches for guns and fake credit numbers were turned down -- but that still left plenty of unsavoury terms to bid against.

Google even sent encouraging emails for the company to bid some more
and widen the terms it was using, although the paper concedes this was likely to have been a generic sales email.

The Times came clean with Google and the search giant no longer
accepting bids on the search terms the newspaper was bidding on.

Nevertheless, the campaign has angered Lord Harris of Haringey, chairman of National Trading Standards. He is quoted in the
report saying: “If Google is allowing these adverts that is wrong and irresponsible.”

Quite rightly, The Times is pointing out that the sting does show that Google does
not have the robust practices in place to govern which adverts do and do not appear and which type of advertisers are allowed to bid.

It just beggars belief. Either the search giant is
willing to turn a blind eye to dubious companies looking to be seen next to highly dubious search results. Or maybe it does take a moral stance, but can't enforce it. Perhaps these terms just slipped
through the net?

Whatever the truth is, neither of these situations is a good reflection of Google -- a company that has repeatedly been shown to not live up to the standards it claims to
hold.